Welcome to my World of Wonderment

Our planet is a neat place, full of weird and unusual people doing weird and unusual things. One oddball thing I like to do is geocache. What other activity is there that makes people travel hundreds of miles to climb a mountain, wade a river, and fight a Bigfoot, just to be the first person to sign a piece of paper rolled up in a 35mm film canister stuffed in the knot hole of a tree? I can't think of any other sport that has such a great mix of technology and the wonderful outdoors. A lot of geocaches are placed in a beautiful setting, or hidden in a challenging or unique way, or in a historical setting. Geocaching allows the finder to share in some of the hiders favorite places, and along the way you get to meet some interesting characters, and occasionally learn something new. While this blog is primarily a geocaching blog, I also use this place to post the occasional funny video or weird news story, or as a platform to rant or rave about something I really have to share. But for the most part this website is about you, the weirdo walking around in circles, talking into your GPS unit like it's a phone, pretending your taking pictures of a phone booth to find find the tiniest micro-cache, or circling your car around and around a light pole in a parking lot trying to retrieve a cache without even getting out of your car.

3/24/09

My wife's brother Tommy came up from French Lick and wanted to do some caching, so since it was spring break, we decided to do the ones on the IU campus. The campus was pretty much a ghost town. The only students left were the ones that couldn't afford to go anywhere. I wondered if this recession has spoiled some parents plans. Instead of getting to go on vacation and send their spoiled kids to San Padre, if they just sent their spoiled kids.

We started out with the web cam cache 'X' marks the spot This was my first web cam cache. Interesting, it's not an ammo can in the woods interesting, but still interesting. I had tried this one a while back but the web cam page wasn't working. This time everything went smooth with my wife capturing the photo back home. There were still a few weirdos around but when made our big Xs and made fools of our selves in public, the weirdos saw we were one of them, and left us alone. After that everything else was your normal geocaching afternoon in an urban area.

So it was about 8pm and we still wanted a few more finds so we decided to find some more around Bloomington. I loaded up all the caches around Bloomington that I thought were park and grabs into our GPSr and we lifted light pole skirts until 12:30 am!

Then for some ungodly reason, the next morning we decided to do it again, and we found geocaches from here to the north side of Indianapolis and back, making our grand total for the weekend 40 I think. We found 34 in a 24 hour period! Most of our finds were uneventful, but nice. We found the Indiana Cache Across America cache which is a real interesting series. There is a cache hidden in all 50 states and if you find them all there is a bonus cache in Washington D.C.. Now that would be a challenge.

Along the way we found a nice park in Mooresville, IN that has 10 caches hidden in close proximity. It has a great mix of ammo cans, micros, and my favorite, a puzzle cache called "Gift"ed. I had solved the puzzle and deciphered the coordinates from home, but when I updated cachemate in my Q it showed the original coordinates, not the solved coordinates. (Spoiler Alert) So Tommy and I decided to solve the puzzle again on the spot, which required the recital of a famous christmas song. We gathered quite a few stares singing carols to each other in the midst of this busy park. Then after we deciphered the puzzle again, I realized that cachemate had a check box in the options to show the corrected coordinates, and the answer was already there. So that was fun, and Tommy thought I was an idiot, which probably isn't far from the truth. The park also has a devious find called Pioneer Gazebo. Somewhere hidden on a 10' diameter gazebo is hidden a micro. Tommy and I thought we looked everywhere and we came up empty handed. I was convinced that it must not be there anymore, until we came home and logged it, and someone else logged it found that same day. I'll have to go back and try that one again. I hope this doesn't end up being another Phoney Cache! At least phoney cache was near my route for my daily commute to and from work, and I could spend a few minutes each day looking for it. This Gazebo cache is nowhere near anywhere I travel regularly, ...at least not yet anyway!

Then we made our way up to the Indianapolis Colts Training Facility to find Go Colts! Tommy and I are huge Colts fans so we wanted to pay hommage to our team. By this time I was pretty beat, so Tommy did most of the retreiving on this one. Then since we were in Indianapolis, I wanted to try one that I have at least 3 DNF's maybe 4. P.P.S.S. #4 Monument CircleThis one I am convinced is not there and you can't tell me otherwise!

So we ended our day on a down note, so I decided we had better go eat at Shapiro's Deli to make us feel better. I'm not sure an $11 turkey sandwich fit the bill. Two sandwiches with chips and a drink. $26! I could buy 4 foot longs with chips and drinks at Subway for the same amount. But at Subway I wouldn't get that NY city asshole attitude like I do at Shapiro's.

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My Equipment

I mainly use a Motorola Q9h (Global) Windows Smart Phone, but I usually carry my Garmin etrex Legend with me just in case my phone has one of those moments. The Q is running Windows after all, so it can't always be trusted.